page_title: American cuisine
section_title: Midwest
hierarchical_section_title: American cuisine / Regional cuisines / Midwest
caption_attribution_description: Persimmon pudding
context_page_description: American cuisine reflects the history of the United States, blending the culinary contributions of various groups of people from around the world, including indigenous American Indians, African Americans, Asians, Europeans, Pacific Islanders, and Latin Americans. Though much of American cuisine is fusion cuisine reflecting global cuisine, many regional cuisines have deeply rooted ethnic heritages, including Cajun, Louisiana Creole, Native American, New Mexican, Pennsylvania Dutch, Soul food, and Tlingit. Early Native Americans utilized a number of cooking methods in early American cuisine that have been blended with early European cooking methods to form the basis of what is now American cuisine. The European settlement of the Americas introduced a number of ingredients, spices, herbs, and cooking styles to the continent. The various styles of cuisine continued expanding well into the 19th and 20th centuries, proportional to the influx of immigrants from many different nations; this influx nurtured a rich diversity in food preparation throughout the country.
context_section_description: Midwestern cuisine today is a very eclectic and odd mix and match of foodways. It covers everything from Kansas City-style barbecue to the Chicago-style hot dog, though many of its classics are very simple, hearty fare. Mostly this region was completely untouched by European and American settlers until after the American Civil War, and excepting Missouri and the heavily forested states near the Great Lakes, was mainly populated by nomadic tribes like the Sioux, Osage, Arapaho, and Cheyenne. As with most other American Indians tribes, these tribes consumed the Three Sisters of beans, maize, and squash, but also for thousands of years followed the herds of bison and hunted them first on foot and then, after the spread of mustangs from the Southwest due to the explorations of conquistadors, on horseback, typically using bow and arrow. There are buffalo jumps dating back nearly ten thousand years and several photographs and written accounts of trappers and homesteaders attesting to their dependence on the buffalo and to a lesser degree elk. After nearly wiping out the elk and bison to nothingness, this region has taken to raising bison alongside cattle for their meat and at an enormous profit, making them into burgers and steaks.
  This region today comprises the states near the Great Lakes and also the Great Plains; much of it is prairie with a very flat terrain where the blue sky meets a neverending horizon. Winters are bitterly cold, windy, and wet. Often that means very harsh blizzards especially near the Great Lakes where Arctic winds blow off of Canada and where the ice on rivers and lakes freezes reliably thick enough for ice hockey to be a favorite pastime in the region and for ice fishing for pike, walleye and panfish to be ubiquitous in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, where they often there after become part of the local tradition of the fish fry. Population density is extremely low away from the Great Lakes and very small towns dominated by enormous farms are the rule with larger cities being the exception. Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and her twin sister city across the river St. Paul dominate the landscape in wealth and size, owing to their ties with manufacturing, finance, transportation, and meatpacking. Smaller places like Omaha, Tulsa, and Kansas City make up local capitals, but the king of them all is Chicago, third largest city in the country, on the shores of Lake Michigan.
  Non-American Indian settlement began in Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan earlier than anywhere else in the region, and thus the food available here ranges from the sublime to the bizarre. As with all of the Midwest, the primary meats here are beef and poultry, since the Midwest has been raising turkeys, chickens, and geese for over a hundred and fifty years; chickens have been so common for so long that the Midwest has several native breeds that are prized for both backyard farming and for farmer's markets, such as the Buckeye and Wyandotte; one, Billina, appears as a character in the second book of the Oz series by L. Frank Baum. Favorite fruits of the region include a few native plants inherited from Native American tribes like the pawpaw and the American persimmons are also highly favored. As with the American South, pawpaws are the region's largest native fruit, about the size of a mango, and are often found growing wild in the region come September, whereafter they are made into preserves and cakes and command quite a price at farmer's markets in Chicago. The American persimmon is often smaller than it is Japanese cousin, about the size of a small plum, but in the Midwest and portions of the East it is the main ingredient in a steamed pudding called persimmon pudding, topped with crème anglaise. Other crops inherited from the Native Americans include wild rice, which grows on the banks of lakes and is a local favorite for fancy meals and today often used in stuffing for Thanksgiving.
  Typical fruits of the region are cold weather crops. Once it was beli
caption: Persimmon pudding. This is a dessert staple of the Midwest.
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